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Concocting Saints at the Vatican Factory?
After Mother Teresa it is Pope Pius XII
Herbert
George H. G. Wells (1866 -1946) historian, a
bitter critic of the Roman Catholic Church and author of several
books including A Short History of the
World and Crux
Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church and
The
Time Machine.
"Why
do people go on pretending about this Christianity?"
***
Note:
Like Americans
manufacture history, the Vatican is busy concocting saints from Mother
Teresa to Sister Alfonso.
The
controversy over the likely canonization of Pope
Pius XII heated up again this week, as the first
rabbi invited to speak to a Synod of Bishops indirectly
criticized the wartime pope, and Pope Benedict XVI three days
later responded with a defense. The back-and-forth is only the
latest chapter in a long-running debate over whether Pius, who
was pope from 1939 to 1958, did enough to help victims
of the Holocaust.
Cardinal
Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli (later
to become Pope Pius XII) signs the Concordat between
Nazi
Germany
and the
Vatican
at a formal ceremony in
Rome
on 20 July 1933. Nazi Vice-Chancellor
Franz von Papen sits at the left, Pacelli in the
middle.
The Concordat effectively legitimized Hitler and the Nazi
government to the eyes of Catholicism, Christianity, and the
world.
Refer to Under
His Very Windows: The
Vatican
and the Holocaust in
Italy
by Susan Zuccotti
Pope Pius XII has often been criticized for his silence during
the extermination of European Jewry during World War II. In his
defense, some have alleged that the pope was doing a great deal
to help the Jews but that his efforts were necessarily behind
the scenes. This meticulously researched and balanced book
examines exactly what the pope, his advisers, and his assistants
at the Vatican Secretariat of State did to help the Jews of
Italy
. It finds that they did very little.
Refer
to Catholicism
Unveiled: What Hides Behind the Public Image? - By Mary Ann
Collins and
Another
Side of Catholicism - By Mary Ann Collins.
Refer to The
Greatest Sins of Pius XII & The Genocide of Orthodox
Christians - By Dr. Jonathan Levy
***
 The
flap began Monday, when, according to an account by John
L. Allen Jr. in the National Catholic Reporter, the Chief
Rabbi of Haifa, Shear-Yashuv Cohen, said
"We
cannot forget the sad and painful fact of how many, including
great religious leaders, didn’t raise a voice in the effort to
save our brethren, but chose to keep silent and help
secretly...We cannot forgive and forget, and we hope you
understand our pain, our sorrow” ...
Refer
to Former
Catholic Sister Says Even Mother Teresa Is a Fraud - By Greg
Szymanski June 6, 2007 and
Mother
Teresa: Beyond the Image
- By Anne
Sebba. Refer to Why
Mother Teresa should Not be a saint - By Christopher
Hitchens - mirror.co.uk and
Mother
Teresa The Final Verdict - By Aroup Chatterjee
and
On
Mother Teresa - By Atanu Dey
The
unholy legacy of Pius XII
The
man who presided over the
Vatican
during the war stands accused of turning a blind eye to the
Holocaust. The "Pius Wars" that have long raged over
the Vatican's desire to declare Pope Pius XII a saint flared up
again over the weekend when the Jesuit priest in charge of the
canonisation process declared that Pope Benedict XVI could not
visit Israel until a disputed panel in Jerusalem's Holocaust
museum, which refers disparagingly to Pius, is removed. His
claim to sainthood was opened by Pope Paul VI, "with the
same sort of urgency and certainty", the
Vatican
journalist Robert Mickens said yesterday, "as when John
Paul II opened the case for Mother
Teresa".
(source:
The
unholy legacy of Pius XII -
independent.co.uk). Refer to The
Goa Inquistion.
***
India
's
English Media glorifies Nazi church!
The
World Council of Churches (WCC) recently received favorable coverage in a section of
India
's English media which hailed it as a liberal Christian
organization that opposes war and proselytism. Hans Ucko, a head
of the WCC, while apparently denouncing conversions through the
use of force or inducements, advocated “the mission of God, to
which the church as well as people of other religious traditions
may be called to participate.” In other words, he preferred
conversions by other means.
 A
primer on the history of the WCC
which is closely linked to the Holocaust
during which Hitler annihilated six million Jews is
in order. The Nazi system was the culmination of 2,000 years of
Christian anti-Semitism. As Elie
Wiesel, 1986 Nobel Laureate, aptly stated, “the
Nazi system did not arise in a void but had its roots deep in a
tradition that prophesied it, prepared for it, and brought it to
maturity. That tradition was inseparable from the past of
Christian, civilized
Europe
.” The New Testament alone, as Professor
Norman Beck has shown, has 450 anti-Semitic verses.
Jesus himself ushered in religious anti-Semitism when he
infamously called the Jews “a brood of vipers” and “the
children of the Devil.” In a milieu where Christianity gained
political ascendancy, the church expanded this false
stereotyping with an arsenal of anti-Semitic rhetoric and
declared all generations of Jews sinful. This resulted in
centuries of persecution, ghettoization, and Inquisition
of the Jews.
 In
the 16th century, Martin Luther of the
Protestant schism whipped up Christian frenzy by
urging his followers to ethnic cleanse and kill the Jews and to
burn the Jewish schools and synagogues. Churches of every stripe
– Protestant, Evangelical, Russian Orthodox, and Roman
Catholic – eagerly participated in the Holocaust when they
actively turned the defenseless Jews over to the Nazis or when
the clergy themselves massacred the Jews. Some of those
murderers such as Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac are being
proclaimed saints today.
The
media unhesitatingly branded the Hindutva
movement fascist even though there has never been any connection
between Hindutva and the Nazis, and when in fact Hindutva groups
have been ardent supporters of the Jews and
Israel
just as Hindus have always been the only defenders of the Jews
throughout the entire Jewish history. Why would the same media
hail a Nazi church? Is it merely because the journalists are
completely ignorant of the history of the Holocaust? Is there
something more sinister?
It is well known that the
USA
government actively contributes to the evangelization of
India
under the guise of faith based
initiative. Christian churches have collectively
launched Project Joshua, and have devised pin code-wise tactics
to convert all Indians to Christianity. Government reports show
that the
USA
channeled at least 2,500 crore rupees into
India
in 2005-2006 alone through Christian missionary organizations. A
substantial part of this funding is controlled by powerful
groups such as World Vision
which are partners of the Nazi church WCC.
The favorable coverage accorded the WCC is paralleled by the
positive coverage Worldvision receives in
India
's English media. This usually translates into more funding for
these organizations from the MNCs as well as Indian corporate
houses, most of whom might be unaware of WCC's Nazi past. It is
also paralleled by the organized campaigns of the church to ban
the Da Vinci Code and more
recently to suppress the telecast of the documentary on the most
exciting archaeological discovery, The
Lost Tomb of Jesus.
Have some journalists abandoned all ethics to turn themselves
into propagandists for Nazi church? Is
it merely a coincidence that the evangelical groups increasingly
control
India
's English media while Nazi churches receive favorable coverage
and archaeological discoveries that militate against Christian
claims are hushed up?
(source:
India's English
media glorifies Nazi church!
-
By Kalavai Venkat - india-forum.com).
***
 Paulos
Mar Gregorios (1922-
1996) who was the Metropolitan
of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Delhi.
He was a man of much substance. In addition to his religious
qualifications he was a distinguished scholar. At one time he
was the President of the Indian Philosophical Congress. He was
also for some time the President of the World Council of
[Christian] Churches. He had remarked that:
“Every
Indian Christian is considered to be a second class Christian in
the Vatican”
Metropolitan Gregorios asked
the Pope
John
Paul II what he thought
was the reason for such a small percentage of Indians having
converted to Christianity although it had been in India for so
long. The Pope said to him the reason was that the Indian mind
was not developed enough to understand the subtlety of thought
of St. Gregory of Nyssa or of St. Thomas Aquinas. Somewhat taken
aback Metropolitan Gregorios asked the Pope if he had read Shankara
or Nagarjuna.
He was immediately shown out of the
room where the audience was taking place.
I found the incident merely
amusing because I did not find this surprising at all, but he
had been much saddened by it, for the issue was more personal
for him. As he said, he realized for
the first time and first hand that every Indian Christian is
considered to be a second class Christian in the Vatican. This
was even more galling for him because he belonged to a branch of
Christianity as ancient as any.
It
illustrates that the Eurocentricism,
and the associated sense of superiority
of the European races and culture, which has very much coloured
Christian doctrine, does not seem to have yet
suffered the fact of the shift in religious demographics.
(source: What
Calls You, Pilgrim? - By Ravi Ravindra -
infinityfoundation.com).
***
Vatican's Sainted
Alphonso: Christianity's carrots for India?
Comments
on the blog:
A
Pole was elected Pope, he worked closely with Lech Walesa and
the
Soviet Union
was gone.
South Korea
is rapidly Christianizing and we get a South
Korean as UN Sec-General. Leaving her own war-torn
country behind and not caring for her own troubled people, Mother
Teresa comes to
India
for charity and gets to become saint.
Kerala
is exporting the largest numbers of Christian priests, nuns and
nurses around the world and so Kerala gets a Christian saint and
India
gets its second. This bodes ill for what these white
Christians intend for
India
. And don’t forget the Magsaysay’s and Nobel’s that are
given as smaller carrots. It
is not enough to earn sainthood with hard work in religious
conversion of heathens but you must also prove you are capable
of a miracle after you are dead. This lady from Kerala is
supposed to have cured someone with clubfoot. Someone should go
to her with bad teeth. Dentists cost the earth and all dentists
are torture chambers. I would gladly give a Kerala woman her
sainthood if she can do miracles with someone's teeth and gums.
Any takers?
(source:
Vatican's
Sainted
Alphonso: Christianity's carrots for India? -
rajeevblogspot.com). Refer to Sister
Alphonsa is a saint now - rediff.com.
Top
of Page
Not India's first woman saint
Robert Taylor (1784 - 1844) in his book Syntagma of
the Evidences of the Christian Religion p.
32 (1828) wrote:
“If
eleven hundred years are justly called the Dark
Ages — how can mankind be said to have been enlightened
by the Gospel?”
(source:
Much
Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art
- By Partha Mitter p. 104 and Ancient
Rants).
Christian
church is obsessed with race
It
is a white supremacist mindset that
claims “Pope Benedict XVI has created
India
’s first woman saint”. Sister Alphonsa of the Immaculate
Conception is not “
India
’s first woman saint” but the first Christian, or more
specifically Catholic, woman saint in
India
.
India
has many woman saints belonging to the homegrown faiths.
If race consciousness were not so pronounced in the Christian
church, especially the Catholic church, she
would have been a saint for the entire Catholic world.
Similarly, a Catholic saint, even if born in
India
, is a Catholic saint, not an Indian saint. On the other hand,
Swami Vidyanand is white and Bhakti Swami Thirtha Krishnapad is
an African American but are revered by all Hindus, regardless of
race. There is no talk of white swami or African American swami.
(source:
Christian
church is obsessed with race - times.co.za).
Indian Media's Inferiority Complex
Indian media went into a tizzy while covering the
canonisation of Sister Alphonsa, an obscure nun, to prove its
secular credentials! Indian journalists forget that this country
has had other women saints too
 As a Frenchman, I was coached right from childhood that logic,
what we in France call cartesianism, is the greatest gift
given to man and that one should use one's reason to tread in
life. Thus, I taught to my students in a Bangalore school of
journalism, the SSCMS, that the first tool of a good reporter is
to go by his or her own judgement on the ground, with the help
of one's first-hand experience -- and not go by second hand
information: What your parents thought, what you have read in
the newspapers, what your caste, religion, culture pushes you
into...
Yet in India, logic does not seem to
apply to most of the media, especially
when it is anything related to Hindus and Hinduism.
One cannot, for instance, equate Muslim terrorists who blow up
innocent civilians in market places all over
India
to angry ordinary Hindus who attack churches without killing
anybody. We know that most of these communal incidents often
involve persons of the same caste -- Dalits and tribals -- some
of them converted to Christianity and some not.
However reprehensible was the destruction of the Babri Masjid,
no Muslim was killed in the process. Compare that with the 'vengeance'
bombings of 1993 in Mumbai, which killed hundreds of
innocent people, mostly Hindus. Yet Indian and Western
journalists keep equating the two, or even showing the Babri
Masjid destruction as the most horrible act of the two.
How can you compare the Sangh Parivar with the Indian Mujahideen,
a deadly terrorist organisation? How can you label Mr Narendra
Modi a mass killer when actually it was ordinary middle class,
or even Dalit Hindus, who went out into the streets in fury when
56 innocent people, many of them women and children, were burnt
in a train? How can you lobby for the lifting of the ban on SIMI,
an organisation which is suspected of having planted bombs in
many Indian cities, killing hundreds of innocent people, while
advocating a ban on the Bajrang Dal, which attacked some
churches after an 84-year-old swami and his followers were
brutally murdered?
There is no logic in journalism in this
country when it applies itself to minorities. Christians
are supposedly only two per cent of the population in
India
, but look how last Sunday many major television channels showed
live the canonisation ceremony of Sister Alphonsa, an obscure
nun from Kerala and see how Union Minister Oscar Fernandes led
an entire Indian delegation to the
Vatican
along with the Indian Ambassador.
It would be impossible in
England
, for instance, which may have a two per cent Hindu minority, to
have live coverage of a major Hindu ceremony, like the
anointment of a new Shankaracharya. What were the 24x7 news
channels, which seem to have deliberately chosen to highlight
this non-event, trying to prove? That they are secular? Is this secularism?
Indian media went into a tizzy while covering the
canonisation of Sister Alphonsa
Saint
Meerabai
India
has never been short of saints. The
woman sage from over 3,000 years ago, Maithreyi, Andal, the Tamil saint from early
in the first Millennium CE and Akkamahadevi, the 15th century
saint from modern-day Karnataka, are but a few examples of women
saints in India. What many publications
failed to mention in the story is that this is the first woman
Christian saint -- not the first Indian woman saint.
"In
India, there were many people who lived like saints, in the Hinduism
and other faiths. They are living in the hearts of people, and
need no one's certificate. Do you think that Saint Mirabai,
Mahatma Gandhi needed any certificate from a religious head?''
This
inferiority complex, as expressed
by television's live coverage of the canonisation of Sister
Alphonsa, is a legacy of the British, who strove to show
themselves as superior and Indian culture as inferior (and
inheritor of the 'White Aryans', a totally false theory).
Refer
to chapter on Women in Hinduism.
***
The headline of the story "
India
gets its first woman saint", run by many newspapers, both
Indian and Western, is very misleading. For
India
has never been short of saints. The
woman sage from over 3,000 years ago, Maithreyi,
Andal, the Tamil saint from early
in the first Millennium CE and
Akkamahadevi, the 15th century
saint from modern-day Karnataka, are but a few examples of women
saints in
India
.
What many publications
failed to mention in the story is that this is the first woman
Christian saint -- not the first Indian woman saint.
This statement is ok, when it comes, for instance, from the BBC,
which always looks at India through the Christian
prism (BBC ran a few months back an untrue and
slanderous documentary on Auroville), but when it comes to the Indian
media, it only shows the grave lack of grounding in Indian
culture and history of most Indian journalists. As a result,
they suffer from an inferiority complex.
This
inferiority complex, as expressed
by television's live coverage of the canonisation of Sister
Alphonsa, is a legacy of the British, who strove to show
themselves as superior and Indian culture as inferior (and
inheritor of the 'White Aryans', a totally false theory). Is it
not time to institute schools of journalism, both private and
public, where not only logic will be taught, but where students
shall be made aware of Indian history and of the greatness of
Indian culture, so that when they go out to report, they will
use their own judgement and become Indian journalists, with a
little bit of feeling, pride and love for their own country?
(source: Not
India
's first woman saint - By Francois Gautier - dailypioneer.com October
16, 2008).
Refer to Holy
row over
India
's first woman saint
- By K
S Hari Kumar - crusadewatch.org). Refer to
The
Hindu Rate Of Wrath – By
Francois Gautier -
outlookindia.com National/Opinion November
10 2008). Refer to After
Haj, it is Christian pilgrimage - crusadewatch.org. Visit Francois
Gautier
website. Refer
to The
disadvantaged Hindus, pampered Minorities
- By R K Ohri. Refer
to Vatican-
Excommunication for female priests - The
Vatican
insisted
Friday that it is properly following Christian tradition by
excluding females from the priesthood as it issued a new warning
that women taking part in ordinations will be excommunicated.
Christian
Saints for Sale
Idiosyncratic
background of St Alphonsa
Annakutty alias Sr. Alphonsa
became an orphan at a tender age. She lived under the nominal care
of relatives until she entered the convent. In 1946, she died at the
age of 36 years, after 20 years nun life within the four walls of
the convent at Bharananganam, near Kottayam. At the age of 13 years,
she had attempted to suicide.According to the Church, her abortive
attempt at suicide was to register her objection to marriage
proposals brought by her guardians. Those aware of Kerala Christian
family relations and the position of girl children in the pre-1960s
could not believe this story. The truth is
that girl children became dearer to Christian families from the
1960s with the emergence of nursing as a lucrative profession.
Even today, economically poor Catholic Christians of Kerala are
using the profession of nun-hood as a shortcut to evade the
liability of unbearable dowry. The choice of nun-hood is the last
option of poverty-stricken Catholic families. If the girl child is
not fit to get any job, parents find nun-hood as an alternative to
dowry. No one can deny this bald truth. From this reality one can
envisage the true cause of Annakutty’s [Alphonsa’s] suicide.
Whatever the secret behind her convent entry, her 20-year tenure in
the convent was a miserable one. The authorities hated and ignored
her; she didn’t even get decent accommodation. She
was not provided with a coat, but slept on a mat made of pandanus
leaf spread on the floor. Possibly her guardians didn’t paid
sufficient alimony to the convent. The bedridden and rejected Sr.
Alphonsa died due to paucity of proper treatment. The
convent where she lodged had 88 nuns at the time of her death, but
only ten nuns attended the funeral. This is the necessary number to
carry the coffin to the burial ground. Today, one who visits
this convent can see a luxurious apartment attributed to Sr.
Alphonsa as the quarters of her 20-year nun-hood! Don’t
worry, this is an age of globalization and market economy, hence it
is indispensable to have a good showroom for marketing a product.
Sr. Alphonsa and her saint-hood is a product to be marketed to mint
money.
Psychopath
of frustrated nuns
Not only Sr. Alphonsa, others in the convent were equally ill-fated.
The reaction of such lesser nuns poured out as psychopathy. Such
nuns exalted Sr. Alphonsa with stories of miracles; the greedy
church made it an opportunity of encashment. Thus Sr. Alphonsa came
into the limelight; several miracles were attributed to her. The
Vatican
started the beatification process on the basis of the news of a
miraculous cure of a clubbed foot with her intervention. Her
contribution to society was zero because of her ever-deteriorating
health. Her attempted suicide made her cripple-footed. The paradox
is that while she failed to cure her own foot, her divine
intervention cures others. The psychopathy of browbeaten nuns became
a blessing in disguise to the church in monetary terms.
Encashment
of Virtuous Hindu psyche
For whom was Sr. Alphonsa raised to sainthood? Of the 60,57,427 [as
per 2001 Census] Kerala Christians, only 40% [24,22,970] believe in
the Catholic way of using saints as intermediaries between God and
man. Other Christians pray to God without intermediaries. Thus
the target group of the Church is 1,76,94,062 virtuous Hindus who
bow before all gods. The success story of Sr. Alphonsa
strengthened Vatican Kerala ties. To the
Vatican
, Kerala became a secured recruiting place for clergy and nuns. And
to the
Kerala
Church
, liberal Hindu offerings before St. Alphonsa became a lucrative
resource.
(source:
Christian
Saints for Sale - By C I Isaac - vijayvaani.com).
Top
of Page
Papal disinformation:
Benedict
XVI has insulted every Indian
Peter
de Rosa wrote in Vicars
of Christ p 48:
"Popes
maimed & were maimed, killed & were killed... Without
question, these pontiffs constitute the most despicable body of
leaders, clerical or lay, in history. They were, frankly,
barbarians. Ancient Rome had nothing to rival them in
rottenness."
Jan
Hus (1372 - 1415) was
a Czech religious thinker, philosopher, reformer, and master at
Charles
University
in
Prague
. The Roman Catholic Church considered the teachings of John Hus
heretical; consequently Hus was excommunicated in 1411,
condemned by the Council of Constance, and burned
at the stake in 1415.
***
Devils
Advocate
As
a part of its time tested localisation strategy ,Church Inc
narrows down on an obscure nun from Kerala who is alleged to have
performed medically certified "miracles" and Ratzinger
wastes no time in canonising her as " Saint
Alphonsamma". It would not be
difficult to argue that this is a token gesture in recognition of
enormous number of low cost religious
foot soldiers that Church Inc has
been able to recruit from the central districts of Kerala
especially in the context of human resource crisis that its faces
in the Christian bastion of Europe.
The fanatical followers of imperialist
political ideologies aka Abrahamic religions are
completely entitled to believe in evidently manifest
irrationalities likes "Miracle" ,"Sainthood",
"Immaculate Conception" but what was despicable was the
way in which the self-professed secular mainstream media in India
converted this purely private Vatican religious fantasy in to one
of those now customary "India Shining " kind of
campaigns that we are often bombarded. (Refer to Mother
Teresa The Final Verdict - By Aroup Chatterjee).
Even
more more shocking was seeing the journalist in NDTV/CNN blatantly
declaring, without even an iota of skepticism, that alleged
"miracles" of Alphonsa were medically verified .All
norms of journalistic proprietary was thrown to winds and channels
were doubling up as Christian Mouthpieces. A viewer would not be
faulted if they believed that it was a gospel broadcasting channel
that they were watching rather than a news channel. That
Christist have infiltrated media is clearly evident now
-the out rightly biased coverage of the recent attacks on
"Churches" was one clear demonstration of this. It
should come as no surprise if rags like
TOI (Times of India)
have sold space to Church groups to
propagate their victim hood tales.
One vividly remembers that when millions of gullible Indians
sincerely believed that Lord Ganesha was drinking milk, the
Mainstream media rightfully assembled few eminent scientist in the
studio who clearly explained the scientific rationale for that
observed phenomenon. But on today's occasion of canonisation of
Alphonsa, one could hardly find sceptics/rationalist being invited
to the studio to expose the
Vatican
tricksters and charlatans who manufacture blatant falsehoods like
"sainthood" ,"miracle" etc and deceive the
masses.
Another aspect of the Indian mindset that
this chest thumping and breast beating over the canonisation
reflects is the continued servitiude to the erstwhile imperialist
and yearning to be rewarded and recognised by the "Whiteman".
I don’t see much hope here.
And
about the Indian state, lesser said the better. A huge contingent
of Christian Politicians are in Rome on a government sponsored
junket to witness this ceremony with Oscar Fernandes predictably
getting the honor of leading it ,in stellar recognition of his
role for maintaining peace and harmony in Mangalore.
India
desperately needs its own version of Christopher
Hitchens and Sam Harris.
(source:
Devils
Advocate
). Refer to Missionary
Position - By Christopher Hitchens
 In
using the solemn and sacred occasion on Sunday, October 12, of
the canonisation of Sister Alphonsa, the first Indian-born
Catholic saint, to make gratuitous and exaggerated remarks about
the condition of Christians in India, Pope Benedict XVI has done
himself and his high office a huge disservice. Most of all he
has hurt the sentiments of millions of Indian Christians who
live here as equal citizens with full constitutional guarantees
and don’t need a foreign religious leader, especially one who
doubles as a temporal head of state, to seek guarantees on their
behalf.
Refer
to Christian
Saints for Sale - By C I Isaac - vijayvaani.com.
Making sweeping generalisations, refusing to
understand the context and nuances of the situation in Karnataka
and Orissa, the Pope has presented a one-sided picture of a
‘hapless’ minority being persecuted by a ‘dominant’
Hindu majority. From
the Inquisition to the hounding
of Galileo — a scientist whose incarceration and
humiliation, solely because he said the Earth moved around the
Sun and not the other way round, Benedict XVI has justified even
recently — the Catholic Church’s hierarchy understands the
establishment-dissent equation only in black and white terms.
Does
the Pope justify and support hate-filled Evangelist literature
that denigrates Hindu gods and goddesses and abuses nativist
spiritual traditions?
The Pope has presented a one-sided picture of a
‘hapless’ minority being persecuted by a ‘dominant’
Hindu majority.
Does
the Pope justify and support hate-filled evangelist literature
that denigrates Hindu gods and goddesses and abuses nativist
spiritual traditions?
This
remains the crux of the crisis in Karnataka. The Pope and his
close followers, remember, criticised the Da Vinci Code and
wanted it banned for hurting Christian sentiments.
Are
Hindu sentiments, on the other hand, fair game?
Refer
to The
Goa Inquisition and
***
As such, the Pope has taken
his pre-conceived notions and decided to impose them upon
India
. There is no question that some Hindu activists have gone over
the top, are guilty of terrible violence, and need to be
punished. Yet, is the issue of induced and fraudulent
conversions — of Christian pastors buying up market share —
not one that exercises the
Vatican?
Does the Pope justify and support hate-filled evangelist literature
that denigrates Hindu gods and goddesses and abuses nativist
spiritual traditions? This remains the crux of the crisis in
Karnataka. The Pope and
his close followers, remember, criticised the Da
Vinci Code and wanted it
banned for hurting Christian sentiments. Are Hindu sentiments,
on the other hand, fair game?
Not every conflict in the world is impelled by just religious
difference. That simplistic and highly flawed correlation is
only made by such minds as Osama bin Laden. The Pope, surely,
must see things with greater intellectual sophistication. In
Orissa, the ethnic conflict between an aboriginal tribal group
and a ‘lower caste’ group pre-existed their formal
categorisation as Hindu and Christian.
In
Assam
, to cite an instance the Pope may never have heard of, the
battle between Bodos and Bangladeshi settlers is at one level a
clash between a locally-rooted community and recent immigrants;
at another level, it is a tussle between
Christians
(the religion of the organised Bodo leadership)
and Muslims. Does the Pope now expect the King of Saudi Arabia,
as Protector of the Holy Mosque, to write to him, as head of the
Vatican
, to get Bodo Christians to stop fighting with Assamese
residents of Bangladeshi origin?
The most disappointing has been the response of the Indian
Catholic clergy, which has completely let down the laity. It is
content saying one thing to political parties in private,
another to the media in public, and is glad to live off the
borrowed publicity —- or notoriety — of Benedict XVI’s
unfortunate remarks. As
for the Pope himself, he began his reign speaking of Christian
values being fundamental to European civilisation and identity.
Yet, it is increasingly apparent he is not willing to use those
parameters to define other civilisations, certainly not to
appreciate the centrality of Hinduism to the Indic civilisation.
India
cannot help feeling let down.
(source: Papal disinformation: Benedict
XVI has insulted every Indian -
dailypioneer.com - Edit page Wednesday,
October 15, 2008).
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